What are your favorite opening lines?

[Raphael]

What are your favorite opening lines of literary works? Perhaps some of you will have more interesting takes on that then I do. I must admit that my own tastes in that matter are pretty boring and conventional and unoriginal.

For non-scriptural literature, I'd put "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice", from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, in first place. Second place would be "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

In religious scriptures, IMO, no matter what you think of the Christian or Jewish religions, or of the Bible or the Tanakh in general, you can't really beat "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." (Genesis 1:1)

As for secular non-fiction, my pick would be "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me", from George Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn.

[rotting bones]

The Iliad, Fitzgerald translation:

Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men—carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.

[WeepingElf]

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

-- William Gibson, Neuromancer

[Raphael]

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

-- William Gibson, Neuromancer

You and me are old enough to understand what that means. Now, about them younger folks...

(Just kidding. It's a great opening.)

[Travis B.]

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

-- William Gibson, Neuromancer

You and me are old enough to understand what that means. Now, about them younger folks...

(Just kidding. It's a great opening.)

Allegedly Gibson wasn't referring to the black-and-white static of a TV tuned to a nonexistent channel that I remember from my childhood but rather the gray/greenish color of an old TV tube warming up while not on an active channel.

[alice]

There's a poem about a battle during a war, which I unfortunately can't find on the internet, which begins unforgettably with something like "Flash! Flash! Bang! Bang! And we blazed away."

[zompist]

"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, it must divide. Thus it has ever been." — Romance of the Three Kingdoms

"This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it." — The Princess Bride, William Goldman

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." — The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien

"In the middle of our life's journey / I found myself in a dark wood / As I had strayed from the straight path." — The Inferno, Dante

"One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n." — The Cyberiad, Stanisław Lem

"When you burn an old carved and gilt picture frame it makes a muted hissing noise in the grate— a sort of genteel fooh— and the gold leaf tints the flames a wonderful peacock blue-green." — Don't Point That Thing at Me, Kyril Bonfiglioli

"I am a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well." — My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk

"Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me." — The Tin Drum, Günter Grass

"Trois cardinaux, un rabbin, un amiral franc-maçon, un trio d'insignificants politicards soumis au bon plaisir d'un trust anglo-saxon, ont fait savoir à la population par radio, puis par placards, qu'on risquait la mort par inanition." — La Disparition, Georges Perec

"Doukipudonktan, se demanda Gabriel excédé." — Zazie dans le métro, Raymond Queneau


The last one can be translated "How do they stink like that, a peeved Gabriel wondered", but I can't think of any way to capture Perec's dive into Parisian slang.

As for Perec, when you start a novel advertised as being written without the letter e, you want to know how he's going to do it, and the answer is with brio, with bravado, with gusto, though not with élan. A translation in the same spirit: "Four cardinals, a rabbi, a cultist admiral, a trio of insignificant politicos in submission to a whimsical Anglo-Saxon trust, impart to our population by radio, also by placards, that it risks ruin by inanition."

[Raphael]

Thank you!

A translation in the same spirit: "Four cardinals, a rabbi, a cultist admiral, a trio of insignificant politicos in submission to a whimsical Anglo-Saxon trust, impart to our population by radio,[...]"

Not "...walk into a bar"?

[Lērisama]

Thank you!

A translation in the same spirit: "Four cardinals, a rabbi, a cultist admiral, a trio of insignificant politicos in submission to a whimsical Anglo-Saxon trust, impart to our population by radio,[...]"

Not "...walk into a bar"?

That's exactly what I was thinking after the first line too.

[Ares Land]

I don't really take notice of opening lines; I guess I'm weird that way! But I like that one:

"I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles." -- Christophe Priest, Inverted World.

[WeepingElf]

Then, there is of course, the famous hyperbaton from Homer's Odyssey:

Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytrôpon

Where the adjective polytrôpon modifies the noun andra.

[quinterbeck]

The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

A few others from the Bible:

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!

The words of the Teacher, son of David, king of Jerusalem:
"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

I'm sure there are other opening lines I like but they aren't readily coming to mind yet.

[Zju]

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." — Anna Karenina

[Ares Land]

More occured to me last night:

"As far as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster." -- OK, that's a movie (Goodfellas). And thinking of mob movies, the opening line of The Godfather makes an impression too: "I believe in America."

Mythology:
"This is the account of when all is still silent and placid. All is silent and calm. Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky." (The Popol Vuh)

[xxx]

"Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure." ("For a long time, I went to bed early.") À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust...

"Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar." (I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.) Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges...

[bradrn]

‘Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss.’ — The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin

‘“I don’t think I can stand the dawn of another Great Day,” said Smirnov.’ — Through Other Eyes, R.A. Lafferty (who has a knack for them, actually)

‘Lorsque j’avais six ans j’ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la forêt vierge qui s'appelait “Histoires Vécues”. Ça représentait un serpent boa qui avalait un fauve.’ — Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I’m sure I’ll be able to think of some more later.

[rotting bones]

"Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortality we sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man—what was left of man—was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the seashore, in the time of the quest for the mystery known as the Elder Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepared to leave the city of my birth and death. I call her Neverness." - Neverness

"Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow." - Titus Groan

"Flesh, knit bone to bone
Your withered earth
Ancient Mother
Scorched tearless You await
The Sky Lord come to thunder
Rumbling His stormy belly
Withholding His urgent seed
Till He shall pierce You with His shafts
Quench the burning air
Rill and pool Your dusts
Fill Your wombs with spiralling jades
Till Your flesh swells up
In the midst of breaking waters
Clenching for release
Thrust forth the Green Child
Ten thousand times reborn
Squeeze Him into the air
Enjewelled by the morning
To take sweet nurture
At Your breasts
That He might dance again
And once more blow His scents
Beneath the skies." - The Chosen

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of the situation." - Donna Tartt, The Secret History

"If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book." - Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

What would translate from Bengali? Possibly this one:

"When Animesh first set foot in Kolkata, the trams were burning and the bullets were flying." - Kalbela

[Glenn]

“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, although she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.”

- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

For me, these are by far the most memorable opening lines that I have read. I first read The Last Unicorn over forty years ago, and I can still recite them almost by heart, even though it has been quite a few years since I last read the book (and there are several other passages from it that I still remember by heart as well).

[Mornche Geddick]

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?"

--Pilgrim's Progress

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

--Paradise Lost

FIRST WITCH.
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

SECOND WITCH.
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.

THIRD WITCH.
That will be ere the set of sun.

--Macbeth

And an honourable mention:

Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death.

It's an honourable mention, because it's the last line of Scene 1 of The Tempest. But it does stick in the mind.

[rotting bones]

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged--the same house, the same people--and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated." - Speak, Memory by Nabokov